Social Media Character Counter

How to use this tool

1. 1

   Paste your text

   Counts update as you type. Nothing is uploaded — the whole tool runs locally in your browser.

2. 2

   Read the statistics

   Characters with and without spaces, words, sentences, paragraphs and lines. Useful for checking a post reads as tightly as you think it does.

3. 3

   Check each platform's bar

   Green means comfortable, amber means close to the limit, red means over. The thin marker on the bar shows where that platform collapses the text.

4. 4

   Rewrite anything past the visible cut-off

   If your main point sits after the marker, move it forward. Most readers never expand a collapsed post.

The limits, and the ones that matter more

Published character limits are widely quoted and rarely the constraint you should design around. The real constraint is how much text a platform shows before it collapses the rest behind a link.

• Twitter / X — 280 characters on a free account, far more on a paid plan. No truncation; the whole post is the visible limit.
• Instagram — 2,200 characters for a caption, but only about 125 show before "more".
• Facebook — over 63,000 characters allowed, collapsed at roughly 477.
• LinkedIn — 3,000 characters, collapsed at around 210.
• TikTok — 2,200 characters for a caption, though the visible area over a video is much smaller.
• YouTube — 5,000 characters for a description, with about 157 visible before "…more".

Why emoji do not count as one character

Computers store text as a sequence of units, and many emoji occupy two of them rather than one. Some occupy far more: the family emoji is built from four separate people emoji joined by invisible connector characters, and a naive counter reports it as eleven characters.

Platforms generally count what a human would call one emoji as one character, which is why a raw string-length count and the number the platform shows can differ noticeably on an emoji-heavy post.

This tool counts the way the platforms do. If you use emoji liberally and sit close to a limit, the difference between the two methods is easily enough to change whether your post fits. Our Emoji Picker covers this in more detail.

Links and how they are counted

Most platforms count a URL by its actual length. X is the exception: every link is passed through its t.co shortener and charged a flat 23 characters regardless of how long or short the original is.

That has a practical consequence. On X, a two-character link and a two-hundred-character link cost exactly the same, so there is no benefit whatsoever to using a URL shortener before posting — you are adding a redirect hop and a point of failure for nothing.

Because this behaviour is unique to X, it has its own dedicated tool. Our Twitter / X Character Counter shows the weighted count alongside the raw one so you can see exactly what the link is costing you.

Writing for the visible portion

If a platform collapses your post, the visible portion is functionally a headline. Its only job is to make expanding worthwhile. Anything else in that space — a greeting, a preamble, throat-clearing — is space spent badly.

The reliable pattern is to lead with the most specific, most surprising or most useful thing you have, then provide the context underneath. This feels backwards to most writers, because it is the opposite of how essays are structured, but a feed is not an essay.

A useful test: read only the visible portion and ask whether you would tap "more". If the answer is no, the post needs reordering rather than shortening.

Line breaks, paragraphs and readability

Character count is not the same as readability. A 400-character post in one block is harder to read than an 800-character post broken into four short paragraphs, even though it is half the length.

This matters most on LinkedIn and Facebook, neither of which supports bold, headings or bullet lists. White space is the only formatting tool available, which makes paragraph breaks disproportionately valuable.

Our LinkedIn Post Formatter and Facebook Post Formatter apply this automatically — breaking long blocks into short paragraphs, adding a hook line and tidying hashtags — while showing the same limit bars you see here.

Cross-posting the same text

Writing one post and publishing it everywhere is efficient and usually visibly wrong. A post that fits X's 280 characters looks abrupt on LinkedIn; a LinkedIn post pasted to X is truncated into nonsense.

Checking one piece of text against every limit at once, as this tool does, is a fast way to see which platforms it will need adapting for. Often the answer is that the core message works everywhere and only the length and tone need changing.

The other thing that rarely transfers is hashtag volume. Fifteen hashtags are normal on Instagram and look like spam on LinkedIn. Adjust that separately from the text itself.

Frequently asked questions

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